The 2026 Winter Olympics ended with a big win for the United States. The U.S. hockey team beat Canada in overtime to win the gold medal for the first time since the 1980 “miracle on ice,” when the U.S. beat the Soviet Union.
Overall, Team USA won a record 12 gold medals in the Cortina and Verona winter games. Among those gold medals are many remarkable stories of perseverance and dedication, but one stands out due to additional elements of bravery, freedom, and international intrigue.
DID YOU KNOW?
U.S. Olympian Alysa Liu’s story is a remarkable American story because it involves escaping from the bondage and danger of communism to the freedom of the United States.
It began when her father, Arthur Liu, was targeted by the Communist regime of China, branded as “Most Wanted” for organizing freedom protests around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The elder Liu left China in his 20s as a political refugee because he had protested the Communist government.
After China cracked down on protesters and murdered an unknown number of potentially thousands of them, Liu miraculously escaped to Hong Kong before eventually fleeing to safety in America, where Alysa was born in 2005.
Alysa then became one of the world’s top figure skaters, and Arthur refused to back down after the CCP tried to intimidate his family before the Beijing Olympics of 2022.
The FBI had warned Liu in October of 2021 that communist spies were after the Liu family as his 16-year-old daughter was preparing for the Winter Olympics.
He kept the terrifying news from his daughter at the time, and chose to let her compete after the U.S. State Department guaranteed her safety while competing inside the very country he had escaped from. “We believed Alysa had a very good chance of making the Olympic team and truly were very scared,” Arthur said in 2022.
At that time, the Justice Department announced charges against five men accused of acting on behalf of China’s communist regime in a series of brazen and wide-ranging schemes to stalk and intimidate Chinese dissidents in the U.S.
Arthur said back then, “I’m not going to let them stop her from going, and I’ll do whatever I can to make sure she’s safe and I’m willing to make sacrifices so she can enjoy the moment… I’m not going to let them win — to stop me — to silence me from expressing my opinions anywhere.”
He also reported that a man called him on the phone in the fall of 2021 before the Olympics, pretending to be an Olympic official, and asked for his and his daughters’ passport numbers. He refused to provide them.
“I felt something fishy was going on,” Arthur said. “From my dealings with the U.S. Figure Skating association, they would never call me on the phone to get copies of our passports. I really cut it short once I realized what he was asking for.”
During the Beijing Olympics, Alysa says she was approached by a stranger late one night at a cafeteria, and that the man followed her and asked her to come to his apartment.
Alysa did quit figure skating for two years after the Beijing Olympics, but then she decided to rejoin the sport with a new attitude. She decided she wouldn’t compete only to win, but to just have fun and show what she can do.
Last week, that young woman overcame the fear and intimidation of the past. As a child of American freedom, she finally won the gold medal at the Olympics in Italy, thanks in part to her father’s quest for freedom and her own fearless fortitude.
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